ChordEase lets you play music with difficult chords easily on any MIDI instrument.

Saturday, August 8, 2015

ChordEase 1.0.12 adds spontaneous tonality and chord substitution

The latest version of ChordEase (1.0.12) lets you specify the chord via continuous controllers, without having to load a song. This was achieved by adding a Chord bar containing drop lists for the current chord’s root, type, bass note, scale, and mode, all remotely controllable via MIDI. If no song is loaded, these new parameters affect the default chord instead. The ability to change the default chord while playing enables a new usage scenario in which tonality is determined spontaneously by navigating a multi-dimensional parameter space, instead of by stepping through a preset chord progression. The tonality can also be automated via functions e.g. periodic waveforms or randomness, provided you have a synth or other device that contains such functions and can output MIDI messages corresponding to them.

ChordEase 1.0.12 also introduces chord substitution, which is supported by switching between two or more chord dictionaries. A chord dictionary defines the set of chord types that a song can use, by mapping each type to a scale and mode. Substituting a different dictionary alters the harmonic content of all your songs at once, by redefining their chord types. Substitution can be remotely controlled via MIDI, so it's possible to switch dictionaries seamlessly during a performance. For example you might have one dictionary for playing melodies and another dictionary for soloing, with a third dictionary containing unorthodox definitions for playing "out".

This version also adds other interesting features and fixes many bugs, some of them critical; see the release notes for details.